BOOKS; Six Novels of Clues to the Soul of Mother Russia

By TIMOTHY L. O'BRIEN

Published: August 5, 2007

CONFRONTING the career-ending possibilities presented by a mass grave unearthed in central Moscow, a government supervisor in Martin Cruz Smith's new novel, ''Stalin's Ghost,'' frets aloud: ''What if the grave runs under the entire court?''

Not one to miss a straight line, Arkady Renko, the stoic, indefatigable investigator who is making his sixth appearance since his debut 26 years ago in Mr. Smith's ''Gorky Park,'' weighs in. ''That's always the problem, isn't it?'' he responds. ''Once you start digging, when to stop?''

Like Holmes, Poirot, Marple, Marlowe, Smiley and other predecessors who are best in show, Renko just doesn't know when to stop digging because he is almost dysfunctional when doing anything else. Renko's turf is, of course, Russia. And a reading of the five Renko novels set in and around there (which means excluding his odd little excursion to Cuba in ''Havana Bay'') offers an incisive encapsulation of Soviet and post-Soviet travails over the last few decades.

Deep down Renko is a patriot. He loves the promise of Russia -- its poetry, music and people -- even though he is routinely battered and emotionally scarred. That's also why he's so often disgusted with the operatic corruption and indignities that swarm around him, and why he loathes the stifling bureaucracy that he is part of yet somehow can't bring himself to leave.

At the end of ''Gorky Park,'' still the most surprising in a collection of often tautly written and deftly woven tales, Renko has the opportunity to defect from the Soviet Union, yet doesn't. Yes, he stays because leaving would imperil Irina, the woman he loves and has helped escape, but where else could he really live? Russian to his bones.

The Berlin Wall wouldn't fall for another 8 years and the dissolution of the Soviet Union wouldn't occur for another 10, so ''Gorky Park'' is steeped in fin de si?e cold war angst. As a well-heeled, Armand Hammer-esque American bribes and murders his way around Moscow, hot for Soviet sables, Renko navigates the gray, oppressive ranks of a Communist administration feeding off itself. People ingratiate themselves to apparatchiks in uniform. Otherwise they disappear.

Renko, whose powers of observation are matched only by his contempt for party-driven venality, cracks the case and snares one of his military superiors in the process. When he turns up again, in ''Polar Star'' (1989), he has fled ''rehabilitation'' in a state psychiatric hospital for anonymity aboard a fishing trawler in the Bering Sea. This time out Moscow is swapped for the subzero nightmare of Siberia; Solzhenitsyn and ''Ivan Denisovitch'' loom large here, evoked through the book's frigid, claustrophobic despair.

Even at sea Renko can't avoid corruption and murder. ''Gogol's great vision of Russia was of a troika madly dashing through the snow, sparks flying, the other nations of the earth watching in awe,'' he tells a smuggler. ''Yours is of a car trunk stuffed with stereo equipment.''

Siberia's prison camps were the most tactile, horrific manifestation of the Soviet failure, of the moral bankruptcy of a state trying to ensure conformity through incarceration. ''Polar Star'' reeks of that failure and offers a singular moment: a convict, naked, choosing to dive into an icy sea rather than be captured and returned to the gulag. Renko watches the convict swim to freedom, and death, as he disappears, wraithlike, beneath the waves.

''Red Square'' (1992) actually ends on a happy note. Renko reunites with Irina, and they hold hands outside the White House in Moscow as Boris Yeltsin presides over the Soviet Union's demise. Watching the glimmer of hope offered by Muscovites marching in a popular uprising, Renko allows himself to believe that even though the ''courage we have at birth becomes hoarded, shriveled, blown away,'' perhaps something better lies ahead for him and his lover.

Well, no.

By the time ''Wolves Eat Dogs'' (2004) takes place, Irina has died because of bungled medical treatment in a Moscow hospital. Soviet Union or no Soviet Union, proper health care is a dice roll, and the burgeoning Yeltsin democracy has given way to a neon-fueled playground for unimaginably wealthy and predatory oligarchs. The Ferris wheel that is a Gorky Park landmark is echoed with haunting dread by another Ferris wheel that sits dormant in Ukraine's most infamous city: Chernobyl. Renko still possesses his dry wit and unflagging sense of honor, but by now he is gaunt, spent and vaguely suicidal.

As he tools around Chernobyl on a wheezing motorcycle, noticing that trees, flowers and even people (albeit many maimed or diseased) have returned to a countryside ticking with radiation, he doesn't hesitate to eat food that makes the readout on his dosimeter run wild. Despite their grim circumstances the Ukrainians and Russians press on, admirably, with decency and a fatalism that courses throughout all of the Renko books. ''To vodka, the first line of radiation defense,'' one of the characters offers as a toast. Everyone drinks.

Renko emerges from ''Wolves'' with an anemic new romance and a troubled, paternalistic relationship with a Moscow street urchin skilled in that prized Russian pursuit, chess. But little of ''Red Square's'' ?n remains. Russia is shown at loose ends, stumbling on an uncertain path.

''Stalin's Ghost'' revolves around another milestone in modern Russian history, the war in Chechnya. Moscow is still the city of ''Wolves Eat Dogs,'' home to parading oligarchs, quasi-criminal entrepreneurs, scheming politicos and average Russians caught between the old and the new, full of pride and irretrievably cynical.

About two-thirds of the way through ''Stalin's Ghost'' Renko encounters a lovely, graceful harpist at the Metropole Hotel in Moscow. She later flirts with him before managing to lasso a garrote around his neck, nearly choking him to death. We have encountered her in different shapes and sizes in earlier books. She is Renko's Russia: brimming with talent, lyrical and entrancing, corrupt and murderous.

Photos: Martin Cruz Smith, above, and Gorky Park, which inspired the title of his first Arkady Renko novel. The sixth is the new ''Stalin's Ghost.''(Photograph by Stuart Isett); (Photograph by Franz Marc Frei/Corbis)